Cliffs of Mass Weather Blog: Northwest Weather: Darkest Before Dawn

It is a famous aphorism that it is always darkest before dawn.

And this wisdom can especially apply to this week’s weather. A big improvement will happen soon

But first, let’s talk about darkness.

330 p.m. Friday in Seattle. It rarely gets worse than this in June.

On Friday, Seattle only received 4.64 MegaJoules per square meter of surface (Joules is a unit of energy). This is the darkest June day since June 2014. June 9 is almost dark. And Saturday was just a little brighter.

Full sun at this time of year should be around 900 watts per square meter.

We had a few days with half of it

With cool, cloudy air covering everyone, soil temperatures have stopped rising and have begun to drop, as demonstrated by a Seattle soil temperature of 8 inches (below). Your tomato plants are not happy. No one is happy.

But I have good news. Top weather models suggest we’ll be out of this hell, at least for a while.

Main problem

The main reason we’re cloudy, wet, and overcast is persistent low pressure or a gully along or just off the West Coast. Below is a weather map at the top (about 18,000 ft) for 11 a.m. Friday.

Mom Mia! An extremely large, high amplitude trench along the West Coast. No wonder it’s dark and deep around here.

An ongoing attempt of one kind or another has taken place over the past few months. And this situation is about to change.

Check out the most powerful, full-fledged extended forecasting model system, the European Central Integrated Forecasting System. Its latest forecast suggests the upper bottom will move slightly inland and weaken on Tuesday morning (pink indicates higher pressure – trough, brown indicates lower pressure – trough) . That should help improve the weather in the Northwest.

On Thursday, a strong bottom will pass north of us and a weak bottom will remain above California. This will create some deterioration in our weather.

But things looked better on Saturday, as a well-developed deep trench offshore and weak trails stretched along the coast. A very different and MUCH more favorable model.

Sit down before I tell you the forecast for next weekend. Saturday’s temperatures, predicted by the National Weather Service’s Modeling Complex (below), show years above 70 in western WA and mid to above 80 in the Columbia River Basin. Sunday will also be nice. It will be like Heaven after what we’ve been through the past few months.

And one more thing, based on the latest expansion models, There is no chance of a terrible heat wave like last June. It’s a black swan event that probably won’t happen again for decades.